According to Shan de Silva, an Oregon State University professor studying the volcano, the 43 mile-wide disc of expanding land around Uturuncu is "one of the fastest uplifting volcanic areas on Earth."

A Wired Science blog writes, "This uplift is likely due to the intrusion of magma at depth and could imply that a large reservoir of magma is building under Uturuncu, which is thought to have not erupted since sometime in the Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago)."

De Silva and his colleagues discovered the volcano's expansion by looking at satellite image data, reports LiveScience. They found that the volcano has been continuously expanding for at least twenty years. But without older data, the volcano reamins a mystery.